(Vienna, 21 February 2019) Together with study partner Andrew R. Reynolds, Balazs Döme from MedUni Vienna's Division of Thoracic Surgery was awarded the Jeremy Jass Prize for Research Excellence in Pathology at the meeting of the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
Every year, the publishers of the Journal of Pathology award the Jeremy Jass Prize for Research Excellence in Pathology to the authors of the best study published during the past year. Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/path.5231
About the study
Pulmonary metastases often form in the advanced stages of breast, bowel and kidney cancer. In order to grow, tumours, including metastatic tumours, require an enormous amount of energy and oxygen and this means that the blood vessels supplying them also need to grow. Many years ago now, targeted antiangiogenic drugs were developed as anti-cancer drugs to suppress angiogenesis. However, they did not really prove effective in pulmonary metastases. The study team comprising experts from Austria, the UK, Belgium and Hungary analysed tissue samples from 164 pulmonary metastases from cancer patients with different types of cancer (breast, kidney and bowel carcinomas). They found that, in 80% of the tissue samples, the malignant cells in the lung “repurposed” existing blood vessels to meet their own needs and hardly any new blood vessels were produced during the course of metastatic growth.
About Balazs Döme
Balazs Döme, MD, PhD is a board-certified pulmonologist and pathologist and head of the Translational Thoracic Oncology Program of the Division of Thoracic Surgery, Department of Surgery, MUW. He was born and grew up in Budapest where he completed a medical degree and a pathology residency at the Semmelweis University in 1997 and 2002, respectively. He did his PhD research at Department of Pathology and Experimental Cancer Research of the Semmelweis University in the tumor angiogenesis lab of Prof. Sandor Paku and received his PhD summa cum laude from the same university in 2004. For his pulmonology training, he worked at the National Koranyi Institute of Pulmonology, Hungary. He joined the Medical University of Vienna in 2011.